


Dip In

by lyrithim



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Baking, Constructive Criticism Welcome, M/M, Pining, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), References to PTSD, Unrequited Love, please note that Steve and Bucky do not get together in this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7444168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s an art to unrequited love—or, the one in which Bucky Barnes bakes out his feelings.</p>
<p>Spoilers for <i>Civil War</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dip In

**Author's Note:**

> The writing is a bit gnarled on purpose to reflect the Angst™. Any constructive criticism / fact-checking is welcomed. Hope you guys enjoy.

It’s easy as whipping cream, is what it is. As easy and as light. You gotta put your arm into it, that’s all—then just go through the motions, and beat them down, beat them down, beat them down.

Don’t stop. Don’t soften at the slightest touch, don’t sink. But most of all, don’t be greedy. Take what you can, soldier, and move on.

After a while, it doesn’t take much effort at all.

—

The pâte brisée is done, and Bucky shoves the thing into his apartment’s enormous oven and listens, for a second, to the deep, single-note groan from its innards that reverberates across the entire chamber. Kitchens, like everything else in the world, seem to have grown bigger. Then again, he is comparing the Avengers Tower, and before that the Wakandan governmental facilities, to the pinhole of an apartment he had shared with Steve before the war. God, he hated that kitchen. Smoke from the stove slicked a thin film of oil on everything—the plates, the floor, the (tiny) kitchen table. Steve hacked out his lungs whenever he turned it on. Still, those were luckier times. They’d have food, at least, when Bucky was able to cook, even if he had to order Steve out the house—Steve, who would always try his hardest to swallow down his coughs, who glared at his toes when when he inevitably gave into it, glared like his body had offended him. Bucky supposes it did. He knows a thing or two about being trapped in an insubordinate body, now.

Feels like a hundred years since then.

( _ Only eighty _ , he reminds himself, then chuckles.)

The original recipe Bucky has knuckled under calls for no less than one cup of sugar—still a terrifying amount to think of. There was never money or time enough to bake for himself or others, back in the day, and sugar was too expensive, not to mention bad for Steve’s lungs. (Fashionable sugar-less flour-less egg-less pastries of the day such as boiled raisin cakes were too, well, depressing.) Now Bucky can go crazy on that shit, and he went from throwing pasta against the wall to throwing baking sheets into the oven.

There’s an art to baking that Bucky finds soothing. Lots of repetition is involved, lots of circles.  Everything is more or less 1) shove the ingredients together 2) roast that thing in a metal box 3) eat. But then there are all these nuances, all these tiny balances among a clusterfuck of a million different ingredients, and the— _ God _ —modern American grocery store stocked with all of the imaginable, and even more unimaginable, options. (Too many, sometimes, but Bucky would rather not think of the times when he broke down in aisle three in Safeway next to Sam.)

Sam. His and Sam’s understanding of each other has grown, more than he could ever have imagined, since the first time they met after the whole Zemo ordeal in the kitchen of the Wakandan rehabilitation center, when Bucky was shoveling a couple dozen more-than-slightly burnt chocolate chip cookies out the oven. And the first thing Sam, that bastard, said when he walked in was  _ Glad to see you do something for yourself _ —yet he said those words so softly, so steadily, that it could convey not malice but genuine concern. It was startling to hear. That the guy cared about him on any level was new. That he cared enough to comment on his new pastime was meteoric. When Bucky finally unscrambled his thoughts enough for a reply, Sam plucked out the least-damaged cookie of the bunch and munched on it while staring Bucky down.

For Bucky’s check-up the month after, Sam visited Wakanda, again in lieu of Steve, who was engaging with the UN as the public face of the so-called superhero rebellion. Bucky had still been iced-up most of his days then, and he resurfaced only a couple dozen of hours in the stretch of a month. It was strangely awkward, as it wasn’t with Steve’s visits, when Sam asked what Bucky had been up to over the past month then clammed up. Bucky, in a moment of mercy, told him he had started working on cupcakes, and the conversations moved about more easily around the subject of food. The afternoon culminated in a vaguely passive-aggressive bake-off in the kitchen, with the winner unable to be decided between the two of them, so Sam left with both batches of the cupcakes—if they could be called such—and promised to deliver them to the King of Wakanda for arbitration.

The next time Bucky woke from cryostasis, there was a piece of neatly folded stationery on the dresser of his detention room. T’Challa wrote, very diplomatically, to decline taking a side in his and Sam’s civil war—but in his heart, Bucky knew he had won.

Bucky glances now over to view of the New York skyline that the Avengers Tower has generously provided, then back to his bowl. The advantage of a metal arm: beating egg whites has never been easier.  _ Put that on a fucking ad somewhere, _ he thinks, then doubles back to that thought to appreciate his own joke again. He is being incredibly funny today.

For several months after Sam’s initial visit—or, in Bucky’s timeline, several weeks—Bucky continued to keep the baking business a secret from anyone else. Steve was able to return to Wakanda in person and not in letters when the last of the Accords crisis was finally tied up with good old-fashioned bureaucracy. Bucky could have slipped in the whole story about trying to remake those cookies they had learned in middle school home economics, before the Depression had really hit, and the resulting disaster. Steve found a cockroach in his shitty Chinese takeout? Bucky found a dead rat at the back of one of the ovens. Steve had served up burnt alfredo sauce for Sharon? Bucky had terrified half of the nurses in the wing for burning a whole batch of sugar cookies the other day. Sam was right there next to him, a couple of times. He could have slapped Bucky on the back, taken out photographic evidence perhaps, maybe offer a strongly worded opposing view. Could have been that easy.

Sam’s words, though, had hit a point that was too true.  _ Something for yourself. _ Something that didn’t involve Steve. Any other time—any other person, even, he thinks—and Bucky would probably have socked them in the face for saying shit like that. Fuck that. But Sam was probably the only other person still living in the world as concerned with the comings and goings of Steve Rogers as Bucky was. And he had said those words so softly. So steadily.

(Then—he scrapes off the dregs of the mixing bowl into the double boiler—there is that ugly dimple in his thoughts around the subject of Sharon, but his ugliness he has always known well. It’s nothing new.  _ Be light _ , he commands. Light and clean. Like gliding over the ragged patches of a cake with cream, he sometimes wants to tell himself, but that’s too self-pitying for jealousy.)

When Bucky’s MRI scans showed no more disturbances at the command of “грузовой вагон,” he was taken off cryo permanently. Without what came to be the drug he had depended on, the sphere of the sky seemed to turn ever slower, and all around him loomed the murdered and the imagined-murdered. He clocked a lower average pascal per punch in his supersoldier physical therapy. His treadmill mile-per-hour was lower. He stopped baking.

This was around when the day-shift nurse for his ward, Nombeko, sat him in front of the television he never used (the screens still reminded him of Zola the ghost, reaching forward in time, haunting him; he preferred print). She flipped to a channel that showcased a kitchen in loud, garish accents—filmed in HD too, better to burn his eyes with—while the two hosts on-screen jabbered away at a million words per second. It was the first time Bucky had ever seen a cooking show.

“Not the greatest, but do yourself a favor and learn something new,” she commanded, then left to check off the list by his bed.

How had she known, though? He wondered about it frequently afterwards. He was baking from the tattered memories of the times he had helped his Mama and her church friends whip up desserts for Christmas. He supplemented his technique with brief, blunt Google searches. His groceries and pans were carried in by T’Challa’s secretaries—and occasionally, hilariously, by T’Challa himself. There was no one else, and nothing else, he consulted.

But the show—Bucky fell in love with it. Bucky was fluent in Xhosa before stepping into T’Challa’s facility (thought  _ that _ carried implications he didn’t like to think about), and he followed the program easily. To see parts put together into a whole was mesmerizing, the repetitions of strokes and cuts and whisks as soothing as a whispered lullaby. And the number of cooking puns that the two hosts were about to fit in every single hour was, quite frankly, a treasure in and of itself.

Soon Nombeko was walking in on him taking notes (a jumble of dozens of languages, whichever was on his mind at the time) during her check-ins. Soon she was resting on the other side of the ottoman during her breaks, at times muttering profanities beneath her breath when the hosts made a choice she found particularly objectionable. When one of the hosts dumped a few slices of American cheese into the pan, she cursed loudly at the screen, and he finally turned and asked  _ why _ , which—though they could very well be of the same age—she took as the insolence of a young man. What proceeded was a very thorough dressing-down, followed closely by a brief lecture on the science and structures of Wakandan gastronomy and the corrupting influence of certain European cooking practices.

They were making pastries together in a few weeks—or, rather, Bucky played sous-chef to Nombeko’s command in the kitchen. Somehow, during the time Bucky was busy pouring his batter into the tiny holes of his baking pan, Nombeko had finished cutting up her golden baseema cake into delicate bite-size pieces, while having time to walk over every three minutes to critique his product. By the time Bucky stuck his cake pops in the styrofoam, Nombeko was pulling out a tray of chocolate brownies, to be distributed among her seventeen grandchildren in the future. When she looked at his meager collection of dripping cake pops, she clicked her tongue in disapproval. In his defense, one-armed baking was quite difficult. (They split the cake pops between themselves later in the afternoon.)

She asked him once why he loved making food. He had not thought about it before, but the answer came easily—it produced something pure with his hands, something extraneous and pleasant. But there was something else too, something deep and primal about this sort of creation—that humans had tamed fire for the sake of cooking. No reason it would not tame him, too.

_ Excessively concerned with the past _ was how she characterized him, with a huff, following his declaration. But a fault that all share, she said. She paused, and she told him that she, like her neighbors, kneaded dough out of necessity—the discovery of vibranium did not automatically feed mouths, and Wakanda was decades before its technology boom. Then baking was for the solidity of the materials beneath her hands, across divorced husbands and deferred careers and national traumas.

She and Bucky have a vigorous email chain going still, half of which are links to various recipes across the world.

( _ 170 degrees Fahrenheit should do _ , he thinks now. He pushes the dial clockwise in another degree—so precisely but imperceptibly that the change is sure to matter not at all—and then moves for the whisk.)

Bucky’s return to the grand old US of A involved dozens of meetings with international representatives, countless mental health checkups, and an endless carousel of cameras and microphones shoved against his face. It was drowning. The colors of the world swirled too closely together at times, and to stay standing he breathed with Sam’s lilting, steadying presence; parried the Widow’s comforting talks of nothing with his own; entertained himself with the strange courtship between the flying cape robot and the flying Sokovian girl; and marked out Steve.

Steve was his perpetual companion. Against all odds, being with him felt like old times revived. In leisure times, he chatted with Steve about the state of modern baseball (Bucky thought it was just appalling; Steve was more tolerant). Other times, they sat together, draped in somberness, punctuated only by a couple of Steve’s weirdly profound sayings, and the space they shared seemed to Bucky a sanctuary from the world. Sometimes they shared snide observations of the contemporary world; other times, they shared memories. The time spent with him felt to Bucky like warmth percolating through the hollows of his bones, melting away all seventy years under the ice

Being out of cryostasis for good meant Bucky had the license to live more bravely.  _ Look _ more closely. In those moments when he became more aware than ever of the tumble and roar of the rush of time, he was more than daring: he would let his eyes linger across Steve’s hairline, the curves of his arms, the weight of his smile. He wanted to memorize him—what he hadn’t dared to let stray in his conscious thought, he lent lease to then. He couldn’t have anything, so might as well have it all.

There were moments in his life when Bucky felt that his love for Steve was almost washed thin, into something not exactly periphery, but no longer blaring. (Something  _ natural _ , he used to think too, trembling, to himself.) Then there were moments when the love seemed all too excessive in feeling, and it was  _ tedious _ to be its jailor always, and he was tempted—out of fatigue (bolstered, however slightly, by hope)—to just let it out. Let its words out and let it raze his known world. But the love returned always to that sweet little thing (of course) and usurped parts of his heart and there—stayed. Habitual. Strong, still. A pulse.

But he hid his baking from Steve again. He opened the windows of his hotel room always, to air out the scent of sweets. He shoved cooking utensils beneath sinks, behind dressers, underneath mattresses. He mastered Dorm Baking and Tiny Kitchen Baking and Traveling Baking across the world and half a dozen states in America, all the while lying by omission.

The fervor first to indict the Winter Soldier then to celebrate the Longest-Serving Prisoner-of-War both ended soon enough, however. When Bucky was kicked out of his very last congressional hearing, Steve stood outside the Capitol to pull him into a tight hug. Tony Stark held a victory party that night, and even more incredibly, Bucky was tugged into several halting conversations with the slurring host that dealt sporadically with emotions and guilts and apologies, mutually. It was one of the more bizarre experiences of his life, even considering everything.

A week later, Bucky was fitted into a new metal arm and a new apartment on the fifty-seventh floor of the Avengers Tower. It was one floor below that of Steve, who had begun sharing his with Sharon two months back.

_ Was saving that place for Cap’s girl, you know _ , Stark had confided to Bucky.  _ Thought him too much of a promise-ring kind of guy to do the scandalous modern thing of moving in with an unwed lady. But now everything works out. _

Life had offered no further drama, and his apartment, his contract with SHIELD, and the weekly dinners and shawarma grabs nailed together his own sort of white picket fence. He was baking more vigorously than ever, hiding the outcomes from Steve more vigorously than ever, until one day he took a good look at himself and finally realized how ridiculous it all was, all this pointless secrecy.

So before Steve’s one hundredth birthday, Bucky sat down to bake his best pal a pie.

Lemon meringue. The same pie Bucky is making now, as he pours the yellow filling into the crust—he has to pour it warm, or else it’ll dew again. It was one of those fancy-looking cakes that wasn’t fancy at all, not before the Depression, and Bucky might have tasted it in some nebulous, ghostly childhood, but likely never for real. The memory for it resurfaced as one episode of his conversations with Steve among the wilderness of the Alps. They had been trading back and forth wishes for when they returned stateside (a good roof— _ a working heater _ —full bags of groceries, every day— _ a little house on the prairie too, while we’re at that _ —a car, no, a flying car—), and there was it, somewhere deep in the muddied space of his mind, the mention of the pie. Bucky could pinpoint no specific context, other than Steve’s almost abashed admittance to  _ Lemon meringue _ . _ I would like that. _

The first attempt was something of a monstrous failure. He didn’t have any experience making things larger than his fists—thought it was wasteful, since he would only end up feeding himself and occasionally Sam—but from he did know, he estimated that at least seven parts of the baking process had gone wrong, including putting too many lemons (the thing was tart as hell), missing the couple of seeds that went down with the pulp, and burning the meringue. The result was too ugly even to troll Sam into tasting, so he ate the whole thing half-angrily by his kitchen counter under an hour. He thus effectively incapacitated himself and was in a miserable state on his sofa when Clint dropped by for their biweekly target competition. 

Clint, as it turned out, was the other baking Avenger on the team. His kids had annual bake sales, and his wife never participated, being a full-time rancher/cowgirl who had No Time For That Shit. Clint himself, however, was keenly aware of the supposed intricacies of elementary school politics, and he was convinced that his kids would suffer all sorts of slings and arrows if the Barton family didn’t present their own pastries—never mind that he was Hawkeye. Clint took one look at the aftermath of Bucky’s kitchen, rolled up his sleeves, and dragged Bucky upright. Then they got working.

Halfway through Clint’s showing Bucky the proper way of making lemon zest, Natasha slipped into the kitchen and perched at the edge of his sofa. They didn’t greet each other, they never really did, even though Bucky suddenly wanted to—he thought he could see past all those walls, all the hidden traps and DO NOT ENTER signs, to where a lonely young girl was trying to slide back pieces of herself on a bed of glass. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t that he had forgotten all the crimes strapped atop his shoulders, all the lives and uncountable changes to history Hydra had forced into his hands—and it wasn’t that he had escaped completely that little room in his head where the walls pushed slowly in—but more than he hated the thing he had become, he hated the people who created it. At some point, to stay there docilely was to let them win. But, he thought, she probably knew all he could say and more anyway. So he flicked lemon skins and eggshells at Clint instead, and she smiled on like a gracious queen.

Tony had ordered a whole fleet of private jets for Steve’s centennial over Steve’s protests, until Bucky slid in a remark about the  _ wonderful _ luck Steve Rogers had had with planes over the course of his life. Tony relented ultimately to a smaller celebration, and he redirected his technological prowess and wealth to shielding the Avengers Tower from the swarms of paparazzi that were closing in as July approached. Steve, as it turned out, had to make do with rolls of streamers, various-sized balloons, and juvenilely ironic IT’S A BOY banners along across the Avengers’ common room, arranged by several superhumans who had absolutely no future in interior decorating. Nonetheless, after returning with Sharon from a charity gala that Steve could not refuse, after Sharon pushed him through the door, Steve took one look at the whole setup—including Natasha, in a party hat and blowing out a party horn—and laughed, then cried, because he was a giant fucking infant.  _ Who planned this? _ Steve then asked, and Bucky pointed at Tony Stark, but everyone was pointing at him, so on a whole it wasn’t too convincing. Steve turned to him and smiled, and he really was like the sun in those poetic clichés, every bit as warm, as bright.  _ Just be glad I’m not recreating the 30’s and making everyone dance to “Skip to My Lou,” _ Bucky told him.  _ I am _ , Steve promised.

The next receptions were so similarly classy that it had almost given Tony an aneurysm during the planning stage, but the point of it all was to mimic normal life, and doing so badly was a given. After the alcoholic versions of Truth and Dare, then Spin the Bottle, Bucky came away with the grand realization that he never wanted to touch lips with the Falcon, never again, especially after Sam had been dared into a sip of Asgardian wine and almost knocked out three of Bucky’s teeth as he was reenacting his last flight sequences on land. By the end of it, both Thor and Steve were pink-faced from a round of Asgardian whiskey shots; Sam, Tony, Clint, and the other mortals close to passing out; Sharon pink and giggling; Vision standing to the side in bemusement; while Wanda and Natasha looked down at their shares of Stark’s finest vodka with something like disappointment.

Bucky pulled out the pie from the fridge when it looked as though Rhodey wouldn’t be able to stand upright much longer, even with Vision as a crutch. It finally came the time for it—the big hurrah at the breaking point of all his useless anxiety—and he stuck the 3, 3 candles right over his and Clint’s careful meringue arrangement and slid it toward the center of the dining table. He avoided looking at it as much as he could.

But Steve wasn’t. He stared at the pie like the yellow was actually gold, and he looked up from his seat at the other end of the table like Bucky had suddenly started singing as a mariachi with Sam and Natasha as backup. Bucky quickly gave Clint his due credit, and was about to make a joke about a mix-up at the cake shop—a lemon meringue for the all-American apple pie—but Steve said, “You remember,” and Bucky was looking down, saying,  _ Yeah, I guess I do _ , and Steve’s waterworks restarted as he hugged Bucky while Tony called obnoxiously in the background about how unpatriotic Bucky was being, upsetting the American icon. And everything was alright.

After opening the presents, they climbed atop the Avengers Tower rooftop to watch fireworks. It was rare that they did this—supervillains had a deep love for attacking America on the Fourth of July—and they ooh’ed and ahh’ed like children with each burst of scattered light. Steve had wanted to sit with Bucky and Sam, but they shooed him away, then waggled their eyebrows aggressively as Steve took a seat next to Sharon. At one point, perhaps organized by Tony Stark himself, the night sky was suddenly plated over with enormous bursts of white stars circumscribed with disks of red and blue, then the blocky text of 100. There was a lot of catcalling at Steve, while Steve himself buried his face in the crook between Sharon’s neck and shoulder, and Sharon herself laughed and stroked his hair. Bucky looked away then, back to the spectacle ahead—let his breath swirl in and out of his throat, steadying himself against the urge to draw a weapon every time the fireworks popped and rattled in his head like a cannon, or rifle, or machine gun. Sam came back to Bucky with a cup of mixed herbal tea at some point, and Bucky took it gratefully. His eyes never strayed toward Steve again that night.

Bucky has come a long way from that first sorry-ass lemon meringue pie all those months ago (almost three years now since he was out of T’Challa’s glass boxes for good). He has gotten to the point where he donated his cakes and muffins to charity bake sales, including the one hosted by Clint’s elementary school, and it drove the man up the wall whenever his Anonymous Donor contributions sold more than the Hawkeye Special. Bucky baked his first triple-layered cake last week, with a chocolate frosting smoother than silk and topped with fucking homemade truffles. Stark took a bite, made a drawn-out pornstar moan, and declared that he was  _ better having this thing in his wedding some day, _ then blanched when he realized Pepper was standing right across the room. What followed was a snafu all on its own for a couple of days, until Bucky found a sloppily written letter that Stark had slipped beneath his door, detailing several outrageous requests as fitting for the marital celebration of a genius, billionaire, playboy, and philanthropist.

Reading the letter, Bucky could not help but imagine Steve’s own cake. Red velvet, probably— _ no white and blue if you can help it, please, Bucky, I’ll have to marry someone _ —and meltingly sweet, with cream-roses bursting over-bloomed atop the highest tier. Or maybe a plain chocolate cake instead, plain and classy, gold dust sprinkled over the fondant under a circlet of teardrop frosting. Either of them, or others still, topped with the black-and-white miniatures of the beautiful bride and the beautiful groom.

A sharp tooth of flame seems to bite into the meringue as Bucky circles the pie with his propane torch. It is almost finished now, the edges already browning, almost ready to serve at the first-floor dining room—Vision, who turns out to be a competitive bastard, is serving some fancy-ass mushroom agnolotti and coq au vin blanc, but this little French pie will go along just fine. It’ll be a crowd-pleaser (he hopes).

At the same time, Bucky wonders—he wonders if Steve will make the same request Tony did,  _ a big favor for me, pal, would mean a lot to us _ . He wonders if Steve would ask the cake for the cake, or if Steve would ask the cake as another gesture—a kind one, a considerate one, but one nonetheless—for him, Bucky, the best friend, the pal.

  
Bucky wonders if he will finally say no.


End file.
